CinemaEspresso

Unexpected Grace is a new drama premiering on Hallmark Movies and Mysteries and it aims to make you feel all of the emotions. Erica Durance (We Need a Little Christmas) stars as a mother without a daughter, Erica Tremblay (Always Amore) stars as a daughter without a mother, and Michael Rady (Chicago Med) plays a father of a daughter who’s also a husband without a wife. So, will these three puzzle pieces figure out how they fit together?

The Gist: Erica Durance plays Noelle Webb, a college English professor who’s going through a divorce and mourning the loss of her teenage daughter Toni. Unbeknownst to Noelle, foreman Jack McCabe (Michael Rady) has moved to town with his teenage daughter Grace (Erica Tremblay). Grace is having a hard time adjusting to her new school. She resents her dad for not running this move by her, all of her classmates are somehow nerds and bullies, and her new teachers expect excellence from her because they’ve read her transcripts. Making matters harder, the older Grace gets the more she wishes that her mother hadn’t passed away when she was so young.

This is when fate steps in and brings Noelle and Grace into each other’s lives — albeit in an unexpected way (get it, the title?). Two years ago, right before she passed away, Noelle’s daughter Toni attached a letter asking for a penpal to a balloon and let the wind whisk it away. That balloon ended up in a tree in Grace’s new front yard, where it sat for two years until Grace found it. Grace, who is super lonely and struggling to make friends, excitedly writes to this potential bestie, unaware that she’s really writing a letter to Toni’s mom. How will Noelle react when she gets a surprise response to her late daughter’s letter? That’s the first of many tough questions that Unexpected Grace asks and answers.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A little bit Ordinary People (the grieving parent part), maybe a little Love, Simon (the advice via penpal part, so I guess actually Love, Victor), maybe a little Parent Trap (what — you think Grace isn’t going to try to set her dad up with her new penpal?).

Performance Worth Watching: Having watched more than my fair share of Hallmark movies, it’s actually rare to see an actual teenager in the lead role. Erica Tremblay, who was probably 13 while filming this movie, has to do so much emotional work — and she has to do a lot of it on her own. Not only is she feeling the loss of a mother she didn’t get to know well, she’s also yearning for acceptance amongst her peers and annoyed with her dad. Those are three very different, difficult emotions to play, and Tremblay delivers a performance that makes you remember what it felt like to be 13 and going through it.

Memorable Dialogue: You can tell that we’re not in holiday territory because, instead of bonding over a shared love like ice skating or candy or something, Jack and Noelle bond over their grief. Jack says, “I miss my wife, I miss being a husband… Now I’m a widower, I’m a single dad, it’s these terms that just make people feel sorry for you.”

Our Take: Hallmark Movies & Mysteries serves two moods: you’re either getting mysteries or misery. Either someone is getting caught in a grill explosion after a catered event or they’re becoming a surrogate mother to a lonely teenager via a years in the making penpal mixup. But like all the mystery movies, there’s a twist to the misery movies — or at least this misery movie: it’s not actually miserable.

I was worried Unexpected Grace might be miserable the instant it become apparent that Toni was dead — which was approximately three and a half minutes in for me, even if the movie waits until the literal halfway point to say it out loud. I tune into Hallmark for larks about love or murder cases that are somehow tame enough to still be TV-G. A dead child reveal way, way before even the first commercial break feels like too much. I feared this would be the kind of movie that’s just a two-hour downer. That’s not the Hallmark that I show up for!

But, unexpectedly, Unexpected Grace manages to avoid most of the melodramatic and maudlin traps that a lot of these kinds of movies fall into. It does so via grounded performances that don’t swing for the fences with tearful monologues. Instead, Erica Durance plays Noelle with a kind of subtle weariness. You can see the toll of two years of grief and loneliness in her private moments, and then she puts on her Normal Noelle face while at work and in public. The same goes for Grace and Jack’s relationship, where their grief undergirds the problems they’re dealing with right now. Grace’s problems in particular — oof, it hurts watching her try to make friends and fail. If you cannot relate to what Grace is dealing with, good for you.

The movie is also saved by a script that stays on track, emotionally true and also adheres to an internal logic. Thank god Noelle’s colleague immediately points out that her emailing with a teenager who thinks that she’s just made friends with cool teen sisters named Noelle and Toni is a bad idea — and Noelle doesn’t disagree! Misunderstandings in this movie arise, run their natural course, and resolve without the kind of prolonging that lesser Hallmark movies would stretch out to the full 83 minutes. That allows the plot to really go places, and it allows for the dynamic between Grace, Noelle, and Jack to progress. I genuinely did not know where the movie was going at times, and that’s a welcome surprise.

That’s not to say that Unexpected Grace is a feel good watch or a movie that I wholeheartedly endorse for all viewers. This one was very close to bumming me out something fierce, and I can’t say that I’m dealing with any of the specific problems on display in this movie. Unexpected Grace could offer as much emotional catastrophe as catharsis, so you’re gonna have to do some self-evaluation and think about how you want and need to feel tonight.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re in the right headspace, Unexpected Grace could be the movie you need right now.